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“My parents grew up here in rural Middle TN during the Depression. To some extent, the lyrics from Alabama’s song, “Song of the South,” applied: “Somebody told us Wall Street fell, but we were so poor, we couldn’t tell!” Since 1865, much of the South has known poverty, so that hadn’t changed much, but at least folks mostly still owned their own farms, had gardens, and livestock, and as a result, had enough to eat.

Now, I look at my family’s little hometown, and like much of rural America, it went from a bustling center of commerce, where the local farm economy supported the shops in town, and the shops and services in town, in turn, supported the local farm family. Sadly, especially since the takeover by government/Big Agra post-WWII of much of the farm economy, the little town now struggles.
Most folks choose to forget the past, and, as a variation on what C.S. Lewis termed “chronological snobbery,” every generation deep down considers itself a little more enlightened, a little smarter and progressive than the preceding ones.

However, just like the young man who, thinking of his ol’ man as a pretty dim bulb when he’s 18 or 19, grows to understand his dad gets a lot smarter as time goes on and life and Reality “happens” to him; this pattern does fortunately serve as a correcting influence. Sadly, though, starting with us Baby Boomers, successive generations seem increasingly self-satisfied in their arrogant folly, not understanding that the artificial prosperity we have enjoyed for a long time now, is not the norm, but is in fact a mere blip in history.

If we’re going to have Depression 2.0, there’s a part of me that would like to go ahead, hold my nose, and get it over with. Break this damnable crony-capitalist system along with the arrogance of the pampered elites. I then realize that when that occurs, it won’t be just the arrogant who suffer; it’ll be good people as well!

I pray we in the church especially will awaken to Reality, and not stay caught up in this corrupt system. We need to be there to be reflections of God’s mercy and wisdom in those times, and not mere victims, addicted to the goodies from the corrupt, collapsing system.”

On Depression 2.0 and crony capitalism: even if you are (unlike me) a believer in democracy (I am a monarchist), you surely must be able to see at this point that both the Democrats and the Republicans serve the interests of the same people. There’s no difference.

I am pro-life and generally pretty socially conservative. You might think I would be a big supporter of Republicans, but I am not. Republicans serve the interest of crony capitalists as opposed to the well-being of communities; just look at their support for free trade. Look at their support for switching over from pensions to 401(k)s. These kinds of things impoverish the vast majority of people and enrich a very small elite. And despite what Bernie Sanders supporters may think, the Democrats support the same things. Recall that it was Bill Clinton who brought us NAFTA, allowing us to hemorrhage manufacturing jobs to Mexico. Who benefited from that? Wealthy elites at the expense of the working class.

It is the same with environmentalism. Republicans support the Ann Coulter-esque form of rape and pillage of the earth to benefit Big Business, whereas Democrats are controlled by a bunch of uber left-wing idiots who usually want to enact policies that do more harm than good (mercury vapor light bulbs, anyone?).

On chronological snobbery: I’ve been guilty of it, and probably you have too. In reality, with industrialization and urbanization to fuel our wealth, we’ve given away something very precious in exchange for material well-being. We have given away community and family, and it has gotten worse with every generation. I think millennials have pretty much reached peak chronological snobbery with their all-consuming focus on persona and lifestyle striving.

Repenting of (turning away from) materialism, pride and liberalism (of both the left and right variety) is the solution.

Uncle Hotep managed to enrage a large (or possibly Extra Large) posse of feminists of every color, creed, and persuasion, but oddly many of them also felt the need to inform him of what great cooks they really are when they aren’t all tied up with the pressures of doin’ their feminism:

Readers are free to speculate as to why feminists felt the need to defend their kitchen skills. For his part, Uncle Hotep was having none of it and delivered the most epic of twitter harpy bitch-slaps:

all you feminists say you can burn on the stove…yet i see no food cooking pics on your profile

It’s important to note that were just as many women who were like, “Right on, Uncle Hotep!” Are these women all oppressed stay-at-home trad-moms? Probably not. Like most women (including me), they likely have jobs.

What Uncle Hotep has managed to do is expose the true and very ugly face of feminism. Feminism is not about women having access to education and jobs; women had those things prior to modern feminism as a result of increased mechanization of household chores. What feminism is about is rooted in insatiable envy which manifests itself as ugly miserliness (highlighting mine):

“The real reason feminists are ugly has nothing to do with their physical appearance. Feminists are ugly because they are miserly with love.

[…] I can’t think of any men of my generation or younger who don’t enjoy cooking. This is in stark contrast to the women of the same generations, who (typically) view cooking as an indignity. The reason for the difference in attitude boils down to what cooking is all about. Cooking is an act of love, an act of service to others. It is an opportunity to care for others in a very fundamental way, to literally nourish them through the work of your own hands. This is precisely what troubles the modern woman so much about cooking (or cleaning, or changing diapers). Serving others in the mind of a feminist is an indignity, so cooking, cleaning, or any other act of service and love is the object of revulsion. Women now actually compete to show off their miserliness in caring for others, each trying to outdo the rest in proving they are the greatest scrooge with love. It has gone so far that large numbers of women are quite proud of the fact that they have never learned to cook or otherwise care for others. Their miserliness is a badge of honor. Not all women have adopted this extremely ugly worldview, but the ones who are going against the grain of the culture here understand better than anyone how uncommon their loving and caring attitudes really are today.”

Feminists find the loving service aspect of cooking to be enragingly degrading. Don’t believe it? Check out a few more tweets to Uncle Hotep:

@handymayhem How can you say that when you have a daughter? You think of your daughter as an inferior person?

There are more (many more) tweets of the same flavor. Uncle Hotep has done an outstanding job with one innocuous tweet of exposing the ugly miserliness of feminism. Normal women with jobs and families definitely don’t want to be associated with such an ugly, hateful ideology that provides them with no benefit.

It’s time to play everyone’s second-favorite game, “Feminist Fact or Crap” (with everyone’s first favorite game of course being How Many Ways Can Feminists Use Images of Their Vaginas and Call It “Art”?)!
Farm Boy quotes Megan Rivera:

Plenty of “modern women” who are into equality with their partners enjoy cleaning and making their home look beautiful. Plenty of modern women who are Feminists enjoy decorating and cooking. Feminism isn’t about demeaning women for being femme, a huge focus of feminism is making sure people have the ability to choose how to live their own lives without harsh judgements of the outside world, and would never dream of looking down on a woman who was a mother, homemaker, domestic, whatever. There are a LOT of women who are Feminists and homemakers, and posts like this and the comments afterward make me feel sad because so many people have a deep, fundamental misunderstanding about what Feminism is and looks like and how Feminists operate. For that I’m truly sorry.

Just as No True Scotsman would ever…so apparently No True Feminist would ever bad-mouth traditionally feminine women or housewives.

Is this claim Fact or Crap?

Let’s go right to the horses’ mouths, shall we? Without further ado, the founding females of modern feminism:

“Housewives are dependent creatures who are still children…parasites.” – Gloria Steinem “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” – Simone deBeauvoir

Oh dear! It turns out Ms. Rivera’s claim is in fact…

Crap!

Just like all of feminism is crap.

Women didn’t need feminism in order to work outside the home. Women have always been able to work outside the home. I work outside the home, and I loathe feminism.

Feminism is NOT about giving women “choices”. Feminism is about the destruction of femininity, the enslavement of women to corporate masters, the sexual degradation of women, and the destruction of family bonds. Women are objectively worse off now than pre-feminism.

Ladies, don’t fall for the lie that you owe feminism anything just because you have a job. You don’t. And definitely don’t believe that feminism supports (or ever supported) women who are housewives.

“I’ve noticed that the children’s book world is full of sentimental/boring works that only adults would be interested in. Every time I go to the library, it seems like I come home with at least one book that looked good, but turns out to be about a kid who’s pet died or a bird whose best friend turned out to be a snowball and then melted. Or about how the author grew up in poverty but it’s okay because they liked eating paint. (I am not making that up.)

Kids like books about cheeky toy trains, hoppy bunnies, funny superheroes, or grand adventures. They like rainbows and unicorns and swashbuckling pirates. They do not want to hear about how if you eat too much candy, you might have to go to the dentist and get a tooth pulled, for goodness’s sakes.”

If you don’t think that there is any particular agenda behind this, listen to the following children’s story.

Moral of the story: It’s fun being married to a cross-dresser!

But it isn’t (just) the liberal/SJW agenda that I’m objecting to. If the story is well-crafted, I could talk through with my kids why I don’t agree with whatever political or “social justice” point the author was trying to make. Kids’ books have always been a bit preachy in their own way, it’s just that back in the day the preachiness was aimed at getting kids to behave and be good and now it’s aimed at getting them to tear down Western civilization faster, faster, faster. But the craft aspect to it is TERRIBLE now. Thornton W. Burgess was a preachy conservationist, but my children loved hearing his stories about Reddy Fox and Lightfoot the Deer (you can listen to his stories being read by non-professional readers here). He was a fine children’s literature writer despite his tendency to anthropomorphize deer and his inability to comprehend that slow death by starvation due to overpopulation is not kinder than a quick death by a hunter’s gun.

Several years ago on another blog I wrote a post entitled What is happening to children’s literature? I think we understand now exactly what is happening to it, but I am going to repost that essay here since it seems relevant.

If you have children, you probably already know that March is National Reading Month.

Because we don’t watch television, our family listens to a lot of audio books. We try to choose ones that we all enjoy listening to and which will appeal to a range of ages. A typical evening in our house finds us gathered in the living room, the children drawing or writing and me working on a blog post, while listening to stories on the CD player. Because of this, I have listened to quite a number of both classic and modern children’s stories, and I have concluded that the modern ones are largely unimpressive.

Surely I am not the only parent who has noticed the startling decline in the quality of children’s literature? I first began thinking about this about ten years ago, when my husband and I noticed that many of the picture story books that had the Caldecott Medal Winner sticker on them were so…weird. The books were uninteresting to children and sometimes even frightened them, but I’m sure they were intriguing to the highly-educated, liberal parents of our generation who were raised to see things that are “alternative” as superior. This is the basic ethos of progressivism; anything new and strange, no matter how objectively crappy, is better than what came before. Weird, disturbing children’s books must be better than the simple, charming types of stories that came before, right?

We have continued to notice this trend as our children have gotten older. One year awhile back, we joined a mother-daughter book club at the library. One of the first books that was assigned to us was called The Higher Power of Lucky. We were given a free copy of the book to read, and let me tell you, it was dreadful. It was equal parts morbid and boring. The ten-year-old main character is a girl named Lucky whose mother died from being electrocuted during a storm; her father is unaccounted for and she lives with her father’s first ex-wife in an old trailer in a depressing desert town. She is obsessed with Charles Darwin for some reason and the primary adventure in the story seems to center around Lucky eavesdropping outside AA meetings and worrying that her guardian will abandon her.

Librarians are obsessed with this book. It is everywhere; it is one of their most highly recommended books. Just now we have returned from the library and there were five copies of the audio book on the shelf. Five copies! Audio books are expensive, and it always takes them ages to order the classic ones that I request, but somehow we have money for five copies of this book. No one ever checks them out, but I’m sure it makes the librarians feel very cheerful and progressive to see them on the shelf.

There were several other books that we read for that book club, all equally strange and uninspiring. Modern children’s books usually have main characters who are female, have an intense grrrll power message, and often involve scenes in which girls behave unethically to get what they want. I allowed our girls to listen to a modern story called The Callahan Cousins on audio book last summer about three cousins (all girls) who stay with their grandmother for the summer. The girls – all grrrl-powered up of course – lie, steal, gossip, sneak out, sneak around, and none of this is portrayed in the story as a negative thing.

I can’t imagine what kind of literature is out there for boys now. I rarely see much of anything geared at boys on the shelves, other than stories based on movies, video games, and TV shows. Classic literature isn’t used much anymore, but the new literature is mostly badly written, dull, upsetting, and uninteresting, mostly progressivist propaganda. Virtually every book for girls in the age range of 7 to 12 seems to include some kind of self-conscious gender-bending or gender “stereotype” smashing theme.

I know that many of my readers are parents and would probably like to know of good books for children between the ages of 7 and 15. I will start by recommending the following five books, none of which are Christian books.

All of these stories are available on audio book at our library, but even if you can’t get the audio version, I think your children would enjoy reading these stories:

These are perfect for young boys as well as girls. You can buy the books, but I very strongly recommended springing for the extra few dollars to buy the audio books. The author reads them himself and includes songs, and his delivery is just so entertaining. I recommend Hank the Cowdog very highly. We have almost the entire series on audio book now (we’ve been purchasing them slowly over the past decade); also, check your library’s children’s audio book collection because they very well may have some of these or may be willing to purchase them.

Here is a YouTube clip of the author, John Erickson, giving a reading (he’s a much in-demand speaker and lecturer and is a salt-of-the earth Texan Christian sort.)

I find Sheryl Sandberg to be quite repellent – not because she is physically ugly, on the contrary, she is a nice looking woman – but rather because her personality is so ugly. Given what a scold she is, I am always amazed that she is taken so seriously by so many men. This fact shakes the good opinion I have of men’s general common sense. From the Air Force to world economic summits, the men in charge seek her out to gather the misleading pearls that fall from her destructive lips. The woman is COO of a social media site, people! She did not cure cancer or invent some lifesaving or labor-saving technology. Why the hell do people think she is some kind of Wise Genius?

Let us consider one of her better-known tidbits of evil wisdom. Mrs. Sandberg wrote in her book Lean In:

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

I can only conclude that she secretly hates women and wants us to be miserable and unhappy. My advice: do exactly the opposite of anything Mrs. Sandberg advises you to do. Assume everything she says is the opposite of reality.

Do not date bad boys. Do not date crazy boys or commitment-phobic boys. Ever. And don’t imagine that you will find a man who wants an equal partner “sexier”. You won’t.

“WHEN a corporate plutocrat in charge of one of the largest propaganda companies in the world urges people to give their entire lives to their jobs, to “lean in” as she likes to put it, shouldn’t people be just a tad suspicious of her motives? Is it possible that the marginalization of leisure and the family just might be in her interests?

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and author of bestselling Lean In, has been pushing the gender revolution for years and she gets more and more ridiculous as she goes. Here she is at the recent meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the oligarchy meets to wage psychological warfare against families and nations and to promote the global triumph of the debt-finance system. (Do you believe there is even such a thing as the World Economic Forum!? What chutzpah these people have! Seriously, they can’t even disguise their blatant intentions for world control.) From Sandberg:

“We assign our chores to our children in the United States, and it can be worse in other parts of the world… The boys are taking out the trash, it takes less time than cleaning the dishes and they get bigger allowances. We start out in our homes with these very different expectations and the time spent on these tasks is incredibly important.”

She went on:

It doesn’t stop there: “Mothers will systematically overestimate their sons’ crawling, and underestimate their daughters’.”

I’m sorry to be cynical, but I believe the ridiculousness of these remarks is calculated. It is calculated to get attention and cause discussion and petty strife. Conflict and emotional disagreements keep the people from wondering why the heck anyone is listening to this billionaire slave driver in the first place.“

Well, it doesn’t keep me from wondering about it. I like my job and try to do it well, but I don’t want to be a slave to it. It’s not my life and my identity – my Lord and my family are my life and my identity. But without faith, kin, and kith, what is left? One’s job. It’s hardly any wonder that Mrs. Sandberg, as part of a tiny and very wealthy elite who benefit by keeping women enslaved to their jobs, wants us to define ourselves in terms of our jobs and gives women terrible advice about dating bad boys and marrying men who want “equal partners” (which in the Sandbergian tongue means men who are ambitious for their wives to lean into their jobs even after marriage and children). A woman without a family has nothing else to devote herself to besides leaning into her job. A woman with a money-grubbing “equalist” husband has no choice but to lean into her job. And these women make Sheryl Sandberg even richer and even more respected by men in power.

The author of the blog Face to Face sometimes writes about the social trend he calls transplantism, which refers to people who migrate in adulthood to a different state from where they were born and grew up. It seems to mean not just moving, but moving in order to satisfy some aspect of status-striving. He outlines three types of status-striving: career, lifestyle, and persona.

He has a number of very interesting posts on this subject, but one caught my eye on Thanksgiving evening, as I was relaxing with a cup of coffee just before we left to go out of town overnight, Transplant-ism Breaking Down Large Family Reunions on Thanksgiving.
Read the whole post (it’s brief), but I’ve picked out a quote that I found interesting:

“My memories of Thanksgiving in the ’80s still included most of the extended family, aside from an uncle and his wife who moved Out West awhile ago (my cousins through them were absent, too). For those of my mother’s siblings who stayed in the general region, it was common to see all the aunts and uncles, as well as the cousins, and of course the grandparents on that side. But those get-togethers involved one-way travel times of at most three hours by car for all involved, and usually under two hours. You could travel there and back in the same day, so nobody needed to put you up.

Contrast with today, where transplants spend seven or eight hours door-to-door, one-way, and will have to be put up for one or more nights.

There’s another way in which the lifestyle strivers seem to be making things worse. Since they’re foodies, meals are a fashion contest, and fashion corrodes tradition. So why would a foodie want to trek all the way back to family, just to have the same old things for Thanksgiving? They would rather spend Thanksgiving alone and pick up a pre-made dinner from Whole Foods, as long as they put sriracha in the stuffing. That’s something you could post to Facebook for status points — not whatever your non-foodie parents would have prepared.”

I found it interesting because this is a subject I’ve written about a bit myself*. But I didn’t realize how bad the whole “foodie” and “friends instead of family” thing had gotten, especially among Gen Y and millennials. I even wondered if maybe he was exaggerating a little bit.

We got into the car and when we hit the highway, I settled back and decided to read the news on NPR on my phone. This was literally the headline article:

“Culturally, we’ve seen the rise of Friendsgiving, as young professionals take the opportunity to create the Thanksgiving they want with their friends,” says Clay Dunn, chief communications officer for Share Our Strength, a hunger nonprofit. “You can avoid your Aunt Ina’s terrible cranberry sauce. You can do what you want.”

And as long as you’re reinventing traditions, he says, why not put more emphasis on the “giving” in your feast? That’s the idea that Share Our Strength is pushing this year. It’s asking people to leverage their holiday goodwill by turning their friendly gatherings into fundraising opportunities to fight childhood hunger.

[…] So if the Friendsgiving fundraiser piques your interest, there are plenty of places to look for tips on planning the feast, like here and here. Share Our Strength has resources, including templates for table name cards and a Pinterest board for cooking and decorating inspiration, too.

[…] And if the do-good feeling isn’t enough to motivate you, Dunn says there are prizes. The top fundraiser will get to tour the official Food Network kitchens in New York.

I just had to laugh at how well the guy from Face to Face had described this. Hey, don’t like the boring cranberry sauce that’s going to be served at your family’s? Then don’t even bother with that multi-state drive home to see them. Do what you want, but whatever you do, make sure to earn status points by creating fancy table name cards and signaling how charitable you are by making it a fundraiser for some charity no one’s ever heard. Of course, there might be a little somethin’ in it for you, you Foodie, you! How many of your friends have gotten to tour the Food Network kitchens, I ask you!

The sad thing is that these young people are chasing after the lie of modernity that blood is no thicker than water. It’s not really about with whom you ate Thanksgiving dinner this year so much as it is about the whole ethos of the age, the disconnectedness, rootlessness, and emptiness of individualism (“You can do what you want!”) in place of family, faith, and tradition.

I’m in a flurry of cleaning, baking, and cooking, but I did want to take a moment to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. And this will sound…oh I don’t know, trite? cliche?…but bear with me please. What I want to tell you is to stop and just let your heart be filled with gratitude for the family you have, your blood relatives and your in-laws, however imperfect they may be. Yes, everyone says that, but the thing is to truly do it. And then tell them how much you love them.

On Halloween, a young man at my daughter’s high school, a senior, died in a catastrophic car crash not far from school. This is a small town and everybody pretty much knows everyone else, so not only the family but the whole community was pretty much devastated.

“If you guys would do one thing for me: take stock of your life and tell everyone you love them. You never know what’s going to happen.”

Apparently she and her brother had had the typical sort of sibling relationship and didn’t exactly spend much time expressing their love for each other. She had gone off to college in August and not seen her brother for some time.

And I know how she now feels.

On the evening of December 4, 2006 my mother called me. I was irritated with her about something and when we hung up, I didn’t say, “I love you, mom.”

Ask me what the one thing is from life that I would change if I could.

No matter how irritated I am with my children, I try to tell them every day before they leave that I love them.

You may find yourself irritated, annoyed or offended by some family member or another tomorrow at Thanksgiving dinner. Let go of the offense. Tell them you love them before you leave. The lie of modernity is that blood is no thicker than water, but that is utter horseshit.

Consumerism, politics, “careers”…it is all meaningless. What I am truly thankful for is the family that I have by blood and by marriage and for the blood of Jesus Christ, shed for the remission of my – and your – sins.

Kith and kin and Christ – the blood you share with your people and the Blood of the Lamb – are the only things that mean anything. Do you have these things?

If not, instead of heading out to that door-buster sale for another piece of crap, I entreat you to call upon the name of the Lord and be saved. And then call your mom or your dad or your kid from whom you’ve been estranged, or whatever relative you have, and tell them you love them.